1. Research informing the ‘teaching’ of critical thinking Joe Allison EdD thesis
Seven years and counting in the making
Vice Chancellor’s Teaching and Learning Conference
University of Plymouth, 14th June, 2018.

2. Research Questions Methodology
To what degree does the understanding and use of critical thinking vary across disciplines?
Informed by:
How academic staff talk about critical thinking, individually, within, and across their discipline
How they try to convey it to their students
Methodology
Four disciplines: Medicine; Environmental Science; Law and Criminology; Education
Four staff interviewed from each, plus observations
Critical realist stance (structure and agency)
Role as a learning developer, increasingly questioning how critical thinking is being addressed
Influenced by Stephen Brookfield version of CT – social process, scaffolded, demonstrated, out of comfort zones
Also informed by reading authors such as Anna Jones (ontological insecurity), Joanna Williams (academic freedom) and Mary Evans (Killing thinking), Henry Giroux (neo-liberalism)
And feeling the effect of this in practice – come and do CT, 1hr on the 17th!

3. ‘it’s more implicit’ ‘I think its unwritten’
‘Yeah, I think on occasions, I think for some of the brighter students they just find a way of finding that out … I think for quite a big block in the middle actually it does appear a bit of a mystery’
‘it’s more implicit’ ‘I think its unwritten’
‘they don’t understand what it is they are expected to do’
‘as you go through education you learn more and more tricks’
‘it’s not necessarily made overt and I think that’s maybe something that we could do better is to signpost it more clearly’
Here are some comments from the interviews, about how CT is developed in the their curriculums
But how did the participants speak of their CT development?

4. Bernstein’s pedagogic device (2000)
Distributive rules: what is taught, by whom
Recontextualising rules: organising and structuring
Evaluative rules: teaching-learning interactions
‘provides conceptual tools to analyse how disciplinary knowledge is produced and transformed into curriculum’
‘how curriculum and teaching-learning interactions potentially shape the consciousness of academics and students’ (Ashwin, 2012; 88)
Bernstein’s interest was in exploring the role pedagogic practices play in cultural reproduction – significant relevance here with CT
Insight into the disciplinary differences
Also,
How identities are impacted by this, in meaningful or tokenistic ways?

5. Teaching-learning interactions
Questioning, challenging, discussion and debate
Small group work, seminars and PBL
Experiential learning and practice element valuable
Dissertations and research projects
Framing
Strong - academic control = visible pedagogies, and a performative curriculum model
Weak – academic less ‘perceived’ control = invisible pedagogies, and a competence curriculum model
Approaches for developing CT most spoken about in the interviews, and much of this witnessed in observations as well
However, great variation in how it went, much to do with the framing
D&B, Qs
‘You must have an opinion on this’
‘So, murder or not?’
‘They watch and listen to the debate’
‘We give them a topic’
‘Which side are they on’
Seminars & PBL
Pre-reading
Seminar worksheet
Sizes
Facilitation
Culture
Diss
Coming together
Choices
Ownership
Support
But for both, academic and student, capital and habitus influential

6. ‘and some of the hoops that we have to go through for accreditation can generate an awful lot of paperwork’
‘there are documentation demands on us which feed into league tables and HEFCE stuff … it doesn’t improve the students experience’
‘feels a frustration because it’s time when I could be creating more exciting lesson plans’
‘don’t always have enough time to do it [teaching] as well as I would like’
‘There probably are better ways but in order to engage them we would need to see changes in our system’

7. Challenges Performative, metrics driven culture
Student expectations – positioning, clarity
Student numbers, time and space in curricula
What is the ‘critical thinking’ we aim for
Bernstein - ‘As we move from collection to integration … the outside will penetrate the schools in new ways … the moral basis of our educational choices will become explicit and we must expect considerable conflict in our values’ (1975; 84).
Desire to measure and quantify everything, particularly in assessment – does anything else matter now!
Students positioned, by us and themselves, as consumers – evidence that they don’t want to be challenged
Also want clarity over expectations (feeds into point above)
Approaches we’re talking about need time and space in the curriculum, which often isn’t afforded, particularly over content – student appetite for this too
‘Empty Vessels’ Friere
Which begs the question, what is it we are aiming for, how should we be talking about it?
Does anybody feel that their values are compromised in addressing CT in their practice?

8. Any Questions? References
Ashwin, P. (2012) Analysing teaching-learning interactions in higher education. London: Continuum.
Bernstein, B. (1975) Class, codes and control (volume III): towards a theory of educational transmission. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Bernstein, B. (2000) Pedagogy, Symbolic Control and identity (revised edition). Oxford: Rowman and Littlefield.